Do we like Zadie Smith?
Our score: 7 out of 10. Decent record and a long habit of showing up for ordinary people, held back by one contested essay on Gaza.
Zadie Smith is a British novelist and essayist who spends much of her energy writing about outsiders. A Danish prize committee praised her this year for portraying the outsider with a distanced perspective and a life-affirming empathy. That's a fair summary of why readers love her.
She has talked about being a latchkey kid with parents decades apart in age, watching telly and hunting for Black faces on screen to work out where she fitted. She also credits her mother's feminism for making her judgmental. It's a childhood that explains a lot about the writer she became.
The big stoush is her May 2024 New Yorker essay Shibboleth, about the Gaza campus protests. She backed a ceasefire and praised the student protesters, but argued much of the trouble lay in loose language. Spiked defended her for it, while critics on social media called the essay both-sides writing that was exhausting and cowardly. Where you land depends on whether you read it as careful or as dodging the death toll.
On the harm test, we found nothing from her on trans people or LGBTQ+ rights, good or bad, so that's a gap rather than a pass. On the planet, she links the climate crisis to the idea of the stranger, saying any of us could become one tomorrow. She has said the point of politics is keeping more people from dying, and on Gaza she has criticised Netanyahu's language as a weapon. Nothing there is harmful.
Her 2025 essay collection Dead and Alive pulled Shibboleth back into the spotlight. The Irish Times reviewer called the collection a ragbag and judged her Gaza writing harshly. The Nation's Q&A shows her acknowledging the scale of the devastation while arguing that justice doesn't need anyone dehumanised.
The good stuff is real, if low-key. In 2011 she became a public face of the campaign to save her local library in north-west London, speaking at a pub near it. No court cases or credible allegations turned up in our searches, and the only odd item was a July 2026 French aggregator rumour of a UK dispute, which it later said looked unfounded.